“How fine to the touch is the feel from everything his,” she sighed, tenderly resting her cheek on his dressing-gown. With a timid hand she picked up a slipper that stood beside his bed and she pressed it to her heart reverently. “I wish I was this leather thing only to hold his feet!” Then she turned to his dresser and passed her hands caressingly over the ivory things on it. “Ach! You lucky brush—smoothing his hair every day!”
All at once she heard footsteps, and before she could collect her thoughts, he entered. Her whole being lit up with the joy of his coming. But one glance at him revealed to her the changed expression that darkened his face. His arms hung limply at his side—the arms she expected to stretch out to her and enfold her. As if struck in the face by his heartless rebuff, she rushed out blindly.
“Just a minute, please,” he managed to detain her. “As a gentleman, I owe you an apology. That night—it was a passing moment of forgetfulness. It’s not to happen again—”
Before he had finished, she had run out scorched with shame by his words.
“Good Lord!” he ejaculated, when he found he was alone. “Who’d ever think that she would take it so? I suppose there is no use trying to explain to her.”
For some time he sat on his bed, staring ruefully. Then, springing to his feet, he threw his things together in a valise. “You’d be a cad if you did not clear out of here at once,” he muttered to himself. “No matter how valuable the scientific inquiry might prove to be, you can’t let the girl run away with herself.”
Shenah Pessah was at the window when she saw John Barnes go out with his suitcases.
“In God’s name, don’t leave me!” she longed to cry out. “You are the only bit of light that I ever had, and now it will be darker and emptier for my eyes than ever before!” But no voice could rise out of her parched lips. She felt a faintness stunning her senses as though some one had cut open the arteries of her wrists and all the blood rushed out of her body.
“Oi weh!” she moaned. “Then it was all nothing to him. Why did he make bitter to me the little sweetness that was dearer to me than my life? What means he a gentleman?
“Why did he make me to shame telling me he didn’t mean nothing? Is it because I’m not a lady alike to him? Is a gentleman only a make-believe man?”